Innovation and Unimpossible Missions

Innovation has become something of a national obsession. In the past year what started as a trickle of conversation has turned into a flood. I’m personally excited about an Australian economy based on the strength of our ideas as well as our natural resources. However, innovation is easy to say but hard to do. If we are going to succeed in this transition it is going to take investment from everyone – from the classroom to the boardroom. Everyone has a role to play, including multi-national companies like GE.

This week GE made two exciting announcements that support the development of Australia’s innovation economy.

The first is the acquisition of Australian technology start-up, Daintree Networks. Daintree is an enterprise Industrial Internet provider of building controls solutions for commercial facilities. Their open-standard networked wireless control solution, ControlScope, is fully engineered by a team of software developers based in Melbourne, Victoria.

What I love about this announcement is that it shows Australian-made technology taking on the world. This team of software engineers based right here in Australia are producing Industrial Internet software and applications that will, together with GE’s technologies, turbo charge Intelligent buildings into reality.

Daintree’s growth over the past year has been phenomenal. They doubled the size of buildings under management from 50 million square feet to 100 million square feet. In doing so, they doubled the size of their engineering team in Melbourne. But what’s more phenomenal are the outcomes they have delivered to their customers. With Daintree’s technology saving customers 50 to 90 cents per square feet, over the past twelve months they saved their customers over USD $50 million in annual savings, with a payback period of just two years. That’s the Industrial Internet in action.

The Daintree team doesn’t see a market of 23 million people, they see a market of 7 billion people. If there’s one thing we can take away from their story, it is that the global opportunity is real and it’s ours for the taking. Technology and innovation will underpin Australia’s future economic growth.

The second is the launch of a GE global open innovation challenge for university students in STEM called “Unimpossible Missions”.  The challenge asks students to disprove an “impossible” idiom through science and technology, similar to what our engineers and scientists did earlier this year with idioms like “a snowball’s chance in hell” and “catching lightning in a bottle”. With this challenge we seek to ignite a passion and curiosity among students for STEM. Challenge them to think laterally, to find solutions to debunk conventional wisdom. Because let’s face it, our future as a successful digital nation depends on it. The winner will receive a scholarship of up to $100,000, a 7-week internship at one of GE’s Global Research Centres and will feature in the next Unimpossible Missions film.

I believe Australia has an enormous talent pool, and for the first time in a long while, I am convinced that our ambition is now starting to match our ability. I’m hoping to see an Australian University on the winning slate for our global challenge – that’s what I’ve signed up to anyway.